Josh Frankel
Review of Lenn E. Goodman, A Guide to The Guide to the Perplexed: A Reader’s Companion to Maimonides Masterwork (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024); and Moses Maimonides, The Guide to the Perplexed: A New Translation, translation and commentary by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024).
Growing up, I had always known of The Guide to the Perplexed but had little sense of what it was. Yes, I am sure I had memorized for a test that it was a book Rambam wrote about philosophy, but that was all I knew. There were rumors and whispers of course. “It is actually a book of mysticism.” “It is heretical.” “So-and-so read it when he was young, and that’s why he went off the derekh.” “The Guide says that there won’t be sacrifices in the Third Beit Ha-Mikdash.” But, on the other hand, it was written by Rambam. Or maybe it wasn’t. Everything was whispers and rumors, but all I knew for certain was that it was a big deal.
It was not until my fourth year in yeshiva that I got to encounter the book. Every year, R. Hillel Rachmani led a haburah in The Guide for the students returning from the army. Like The Guide itself, everyone knew this class existed, but most knew little of what was actually taught.
The very first class surprised me. We opened the book, at the beginning, with Rambam’s introduction. I was expecting a book that would be heavy, dense, and formal. Instead, I discovered a light, second-person, conversational tone. As the author laid out the key problem that needed to be addressed―the seeming contradictions between Torah and Reason―and presented a plan for how he would answer it, it felt as if he were in the room, talking to me, directly. That’s what Rambam does in The Guide. He speaks right to you, entices you, traps you, and then moves headlong into the lexicographical chapters.
For the next 30 chapters, The Guide is a slog. Rambam goes word by word through the Bible showing that every anthropomorphic phrase attributed to God can be read metaphorically. In our haburah, those first chapters took their toll on attendance, and from the dozens who started, only a few were left. I don’t know why I kept going―but there was something in Rambam’s voice that had me hooked. As we progressed slowly through those opening chapters, R. Rachmani, seeing that I was caught, gave me some extra-credit work to do: The Open University’s two-semester course on Greek Philosophy. All of the material was in the yeshiva library, and he told me that if I wanted to understand The Guide, I needed to start there. So, for the next few months, while Abaye and Rava spoke to me in the morning, my afternoons were spent in conversation with Plato and Aristotle.
That is the challenge of The Guide. Despite its age, it remains one of the most relevant books to contemporary Jewish thinkers. It is well organized, composed in an engaging, second-person format and published in vernacular. However, at the same time, it is nearly impenetrable. It demands knowledge of Greek and medieval philosophy, along with a strong background in rabbinic texts. Oh, and that vernacular―it is an archaic Judeo-Arabic that leaves most readers (this reviewer included) at the mercy of translators.
This spring, The Guide to the Perplexed has been made significantly more accessible to English readers with two new volumes. The first is a new translation from Arabic to English by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip Lieberman. Being incapable of reading The Guide in Arabic, I cannot comment on the quality or fidelity of the translation, but I can remark on the experience of reading their work. Every translator is beset with the dilemma of choosing between the individual words of a text or its overall meaning, and such choices in rendering The Guide have led to significantly different translations that invite meaningfully different readings. That challenge is compounded when translating The Guide because of its light, almost casual tone. For some readers, the tone of the book is incidental, and what matters most is fidelity to the rigid philosophical concepts that are discussed. However, Goodman and Lieberman see the conversational style as essential to Rambam’s pedagogical project. Therefore, they made preserving the fluidity and emotional register of the book a priority in their translation (A New Translation, lxxiii). The result is a text that is a pleasure to read while containing ample citations and commentary to ensure that the careful student does not venture far from the author’s original intent.
The second book is a thin companion volume by Lenn E. Goodman titled A Guide to The Guide to the Perplexed. This book promises the English reader the framework and insight necessary to appreciate the depths of The Guide. In this short work, divided into three sections, Goodman explores who Rambam is and what The Guide is about, and he proposes a scaffolding and direction for students to follow as they explore Rambam’s instruction.
Goodman’s first section is a concise biography of Rambam. Goodman draws on the work of other recent biographers including Moshe Halbertal and Joel Kraemer,[1] and he combines them with a political and intellectual history of the time. Brought together, we get a sharp portrait of Maimonides, set in his own time and place.
On the one hand, Goodman explains why a Jew, who calls himself “The Spaniard,” living outside of Cairo in the 12th century, should write a book in Arabic combining Greek and Hebrew traditions that were already over 1,500 years old. At the same time, he enables us to see a single person who would be capable and motivated to write in the myriad different styles and formats that Rambam engaged. It can be challenging to reconcile the Rambam that wrote The Guide with the Rambam that wrote the Mishneh Torah, but in Goodman’s description, these two people meld. He does not accomplish this by simplifying, but by complicating. By walking us through his life and introducing us to his writings that escape the yeshiva, we see a fuller and more complex person than the one we usually encounter.
When, as a yeshiva student, I met the Rambam of The Guide, I felt intellectually liberated. I had so many questions and so many doubts that were taboo: questions about the divinity of the Torah, about Providence, about sacred history, and more―all questions that I was afraid to ask. But Rambam was a teacher who was willing to ask all of these questions and more. However, when I discussed this with some of my teachers, they chided me for being anachronistic. There is no way, they argued, that a medieval thinker could have imagined a world without God, or a human Torah. Rambam, they were certain, was not entertaining these ideas seriously; he was only justifying what he knew already to be true. Goodman clearly shows that Rambam read and considered all these heretical ideas and more. Goodman also plainly accepts the evidence that Rambam lived as a Muslim for a number of years. Many options, including Judaism, various strains of Islam, and secular philosophy, were all present before Rambam, just as they were before the Khazar king. Goodman’s Rambam is a free thinker, completely relatable today.
Here, however, I must provide a warning. Professor Goodman’s Guide to the Guide is not for the faint of heart. While he tries mightily to introduce each actor we encounter, his focus is on brevity. He cannot write a full introduction to medieval Islamic society, politics, or thought, and he takes for granted that the reader carries a fair amount of cultural background, along with knowledge of rabbinic thought and texts. Without that background, and much patience, this first section can quickly become a jumble of rabbis, princes, and Muslim theologians.
The core of this book is its second section. Here, Goodman walks the reader through the greatest hits of The Guide. Will versus Wisdom, the Garden of Eden, Job, Emanation, Miracles―the hot topics are laid out alongside each other. However, this is not a survey of the literature. Rather, Goodman presents his take on each of these controversial elements and weaves them together into a coherent image of what Rambam intends to communicate.
In his introduction to The Guide, Rambam catalogs the various types of errors and contradictions that books may contain. He clarifies that most of them will be absent from The Guide, but that readers should be on the lookout for contradictions of the seventh type:
Sometimes, with the deepest subjects, certain ideas may have to be suppressed and others revealed. A certain premise may be needed for the sake of the argument in one context; its contradictory, in another. The ordinary reader should not sense the discrepancy at all, and an author might use all sorts of devices to conceal it. (A New Translation, 17)
Spotting, and explaining, these Type VII contradictions is the sport of The Guide. Readers can be split into two camps. The first are the Harmonists that seek to maintain both sides of the contradiction. They will argue either that the seeming contradiction is superficial and that a deeper understanding reveals a way for both sides to be true, or that the truth lies beyond the contradiction and that both premises are only means to a third, undescribed truth. At the other pole stand the Esotericists. These readers believe that one side represents the true, hidden meaning of The Guide, while the other is meant to obfuscate.
In the centuries since The Guide’s publication, there have been many Esotericists who claimed to know its true meaning. R. Yaakov Emden was so convinced that the opinions of The Guide, hidden by the Type VII contradictions, were heretical that he proclaimed The Guide to be a forgery―lest it impugn on Rambam’s mighty reputation.[2] On the other hand, R. Michael Rosensweig has argued to me that the true reading of The Guide is quite banal and Orthodox, and the more challenging chapters and comments are there to appease would-be philosophers and keep them in the fold.
Against this backdrop, Goodman’s readings dazzle. Just as he plumbed complexity to bring us a holistic image of Rambam, he does the same for The Guide. One by one, he touches on the topics and contradictions of The Guide, briefly presents his reading, and weaves them together into a compelling whole. He even shows how the seemingly dull lexicographical chapters are full of enchantment and wisdom, when read carefully and harmonistically. Here, however, I do take issue. Goodman places I:15, in which Jacob’s dream of the ladder is described, as the crux of these earlier chapters. While this is one of my favorite chapters of The Guide, my teacher R. Rachmani focused on the chapter’s brief end, describing Moses’s vision of the 13 Attributes as the section’s center of gravity.
My only disappointment is that Goodman barely discusses Chapter III:51. This chapter is a flowing narrative, full of metaphors, describing how a person can enter into God’s presence and possibly even see God. It is warm, mystical, and stands in sharp contrast to the colder, intellectual, negative theology that dominates the rest of the book. How to read that chapter and make sense of its place within The Guide is something I struggle with, and I wish Goodman would have shared his thoughts.
In the third section of the book, Goodman names his antagonist: Leo Strauss. Strauss was a giant of 20th-century political thought. One of the many German Jewish intellectuals who found refuge at the New School, he eventually made his career at the University of Chicago. While he wrote about political theory and the contemporary world, he was inspired by many medieval thinkers, including Rambam. He produced Shlomo Pines’s English translation of The Guide and attached a long, influential introduction to the beginning.[3] Here, he staked a claim as the greatest of the Esotericists. Strauss argued that Rambam’s writing was proscribed by the religious orthodoxies of his time. Wherever Rambam agreed with prevalent beliefs, we should discount his words as being written to ameliorate the masses and those in power. Rather, to find out what Rambam truly believed, we need to hunt down riddles in asides, in Type VII contradictions, and in his exposition of alternative theories which he ostensibly rejects.
The Rambam that emerges from Strauss is a cold, calculating atheist who lived decades of his life, wrote myriad books, led his community, and served in the Egyptian court, all out of fear of his would-be inquisitors. Rambam becomes Strauss’s paradigm for persecuted writers in authoritarian societies across the globe and history. To put it mildly, Goodman disagrees.
In a telling moment of speculation, Goodman suggests that Strauss’s approach may be driven by Rambam’s discussion of the celestial spheres. Rambam spends many chapters explaining how these supposed spheres surrounding the earth, with the stars and planets embedded within them, constituted the mechanism that transmits God’s will and wisdom into our world through a process called Emanation. Rambam identifies these spheres as the Bible’s angels, carefully parsing Ezekiel’s vision of the Chariot (Ezekiel 1) to reflect this astronomical model. The problem for Strauss and all modern readers is that Rambam was wrong―there are no spheres. Given that the seemingly central tenet of The Guide is patently false, it may leave the rest of the book in shambles. This is the position that Goodman attributes to Strauss. With the philosophy of The Guide wrecked, Strauss opts to salvage the book with a political reading.
In contrast, Goodman is able to read The Guide in spite of the spheres. In the second section of the book, which was dedicated to integrating and harmonizing so many of The Guide’s seeming contradictions, Goodman reserved a significant portion to rejecting Rambam’s analysis of the spheres. He argues that Rambam himself saw his work on the spheres as being speculative, and that his theory of emanation, the flow from the divine to our material world, was not dependent on understanding the precise mechanism by which it functions. Goodman offers an analogy to the Mind-Body problem. Just because we have not―or perhaps cannot―identify the mechanics that join the mind and body does not mean that they are not connected. We can continue to study both parts and assert their relationship, even if the technical aspect has not been worked out. So, in amputating Rambam’s discussion of the spheres, Goodman preserves the rest of The Guide as a meaningful, compelling work for the contemporary reader. And while we can still appreciate Rambam’s understanding of Ma’aseh Merkavah abstractly, the first chapter of Ezekiel remains a mystery (Guide to the Guide, 154-155).
Even a dedicated Harmonist like Goodman must engage with the challenges of the Esotericists. After all, it is Rambam himself who repeatedly warns against revealing too much information to ordinary people and intimates that there exists a deeper reading of The Guide for those in the know. Goodman solves this by splitting between what he calls hermetic, or occult, and esoteric. Hermetic or occult teachings are secret, hidden away, and accessible only to a select few. When Rambam writes of a deeper meaning, or of hiding knowledge away from the untrained, this is not what Goodman believes he is doing.
Rather, Goodman leans on Lucian, a second-century satirist who first introduced the term esoteric to describe some of Aristotle’s teachings. Most of Aristotle’s surviving works are based on public, outdoor lectures he gave―his exoteric teaching. These lectures were open to the public and designed to be accessible to any intelligent person. However, for students in the Lyceum itself, he gave different, indoor lectures. These esoteric lectures were not secret, nor did they contradict his outdoor work, but they were more technical and went deeper, as only advanced students with previous philosophical training were present.
This second understanding is key for Goodman in reading The Guide. Yes, the untrained reader will learn that God cannot be physical and that the Torah’s account of creation is reasonable. They will read about how God’s grace emanates into the world through the motion of the spheres and about the multiple ways the commandments affect us and society. All of this is in the book and reflects what Rambam truly believes. But, to understand the significance of each line, to realize the implications of each argument and riposte, and to appreciate this book as a transformational, spiritual work that it is, a reader needs three things. They need a background in the Bible and rabbinic literature, a basic understanding of classical and medieval philosophy, and a patient, wise teacher like Lenn E. Goodman to serve as their Guide to the Guide to the Perplexed.
[1] See Moshe Halbertal, Maimonides: Life and Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
[2] See R. Gavin Michal, “R. Yaakov Emden’s ‘Cognitive Dissonance’ with Regard to Maimonides,” Kotzk Blog, September 8, 2019, https://www.kotzkblog.com/2019/09/242-r-yaakov-emdens-cognitive_8.html.
[3] Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated and with introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines, introductory essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
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